Arash Ajoudani

Arash Ajoudani is the director of the Human-Robot Interfaces and Interaction (HRI²) laboratory at IIT. He has been awarded two European Research Council (ERC) grants for PoC Real-Move and StG Ergo-Lean, and a CoG FIS (Fondo Italiano per la Scienza) consolidator grant for EPIC. He has coordinated the Horizon 2020 project SOPHIA, co-coordinated the Horizon 2020 project CONCERT, and served as principal investigator for several European projects  (e.g., HE Tornado, the MSCA RAICAM), and large national projects (e.g., ErgoCub CORE, VIVA, PROMETEO, TECH4DPI, LABORIUS, REFINGER, COROMAN).
He has received several awards and recognitions, including the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Early Academic Career Award in Robotics and Automation, the IEEE CIS Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems Outstanding Paper Award, the Amazon Research Award, the KUKA Innovation Award, the MECSPE Solution Award, the MECSPE Robotics and AI Innovation Award mention, the SmartCup Liguria Award, the WeRob Best Poster Award, and the Best Student Paper Award at ROBIO. He has been an elected member of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Administrative Committee (Class 2024 and Class 2027) and has been named a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE RAS Technical Committee on Collaborative Automation for Flexible Manufacturing. He has also received recognition from the European Commission through the “Success Stories of EU-funded Projects” initiative for the H2020 SOPHIA project and has contributed to the CEN Workshop Agreement on guidelines for introducing and implementing real-time instrumental-based tools for biomechanical risk assessment. His PhD thesis was a finalist for the Georges Giralt PhD Award for the best European PhD thesis in robotics. His research has also been recognized through numerous best paper, best conference paper, best oral paper, best student paper, and best presentation finalist distinctions at leading robotics venues, including ICRA, IROS, RO-MAN, ARSO, Humanoids, I-RIM, and SIDRA Automatica.
He served as an IIT principal investigator and established the Robotics for Manufacturing (R4M) joint lab with Leonardo Labs, as well as the IIT–Intellimech JOiiNT lab. He is the author of the book "Transferring Human Impedance Regulation Skills to Robots" in the Springer Tracts in Advanced Robotics (STAR), and several publications in journals, international conferences, and book chapters. He is a Senior Editor of the International Journal of Robotics Research (IJRR). He has been serving as a member of scientific advisory committee and as an associate editor for several international journals and conferences such as IEEE RAL, ICRA, IROS, ICORR, etc. He is a scholar of the European Lab for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS). His main research interests are in physical human-robot interaction, mobile manipulation, robust and adaptive control, assistive robotics, and tele-robotics.